Author note: More b.s. manga science coming your way! :D

The files sat on the dining room table as though begging him to grasp some great revelation from them.

But no immediate significance jumped out at Tsuzuki from what pages he could even begin to understand. And he was getting more than a little irritated, being forced to guess what Muraki was up to all the time with only the barest of information granted to him. "Just tell me what I'm supposed to be looking at."

"These were given to me by a colleague of Ukyou's. Proof of what they were able to accomplish at their laboratories, should anything unfortunate occur."

Muraki did not pace. He leaned against the window sill, backlit by the sun, staring gravely at Tsuzuki, yet there was an impatience in his tone. And somehow Tsuzuki felt like the one pulling teeth. "And that is?"

"To cure the incurable, and bring people back from the brink of death. She was able to save dozens of lives by utilizing a new gene therapy. A virus, reprogrammed to implant and replicate key strands of your DNA in the recipient's T-cells, thereby turning them into super-repairing machines."

Tsuzuki shook his head. "I don't believe it."

Yet, at the same time, he did. Nor did he need the hard copies in front of him to convince him. It seemed to him now that this had been coming for quite some time.

"Why not?" Muraki said with a small smile, and Tsuzuki could already guess what he was going to say. "It's not so different from what my grandfather was trying to accomplish half a century ago—though his methods seem like so much fumbling in the dark when compared to what progress we've been able to make with today's technology. It's no wonder he met with little success in his time when one considers the tools to which he was limited. As a result, most of his patients went mad when subjected to your genetic material—if they survived his experiments."

"If they survived? He didn't just inject them with my blood, too?"

"Oh, that was just the beginning. You would be amazed what variety of uses he found for your cells. Even I was not his and Father's first attempt at creating a child of your blood. If you could see for yourself what horrors their failures took the form of, you would be surprised my mother remained as sane as she did."

While Muraki said this, the smile remained planted firm on his lips. Only as he mentioned his mother did Tsuzuki realize that what he had first taken as a sign of Muraki's amusement and intellectual interest, was inextricably tangled with disgust and an old anger. Perhaps Tsuzuki wasn't the only one who was ashamed of ever having been mixed up with Muraki Yukitaka.

"And from what I have been able to tell," the doctor went on, either unaware much of this was going over Tsuzuki's head or not caring, "Ukyou met with the same obstacles in her experiments with the tissue she had cloned from Grandfather's original samples. Her animal subjects became violent when subjected to your genetic material—attacking one another, or else harming themselves. Some simply refused to eat and perished of a lack of will to live. She did succeed in tweaking the DNA of certain plants, however, recoding them to produce flowers perpetually, but plants do not have minds to lose—at least, as far as we know.

"But then you came along—that is, you in your current, immortal shinigami form, and the two of you created a hybrid of your own, with the inhuman portion of your code intact. My grandfather lacked the ability to separate the cells of two individuals from one sample, but we live in a time capable of such amazing feats. Unbeknownst to Ukyou, her assistant was able to isolate the DNA of your child from a sample of her blood, and turn it into a wonder-drug."

Tsuzuki felt his blood run cold within him. "Wait a second. I thought we were talking about experiments using my DNA. But you're saying the people in those files—" He gestured vaguely to the ones on the table in front of him, suddenly loth to touch them. "—they were injected with my child's?" And that child not even born. If it had the ability to cure while still in the womb, what might it be capable of when—if, Tsuzuki reminded himself—it reached adulthood?

"But if you're my child, too—technically—why couldn't they just use yours?"

Muraki didn't move, only narrowed his eyes has he held Tsuzuki's. "Do you think I never tried that? No, it was something that child inherited that I did not—or perhaps something inextricably linked to your shinigami essence that the samples taken from you when you were alive—that is to say, the samples that made me—never possessed.

"Which makes this all rather serendipitous, wouldn't you agree? Just when your cells were about to be deemed insufficient to meet the aspirations of Sakuraiji Pharmaceuticals, a more effective donor was discovered. One could even say created, as if on command. Yes, your child. Yours and Ukyou's. A hybrid of a hybrid who somehow inherited just the combination of genes to suit their purposes. It couldn't have worked out better if you two had planned it."

The way Muraki put it, Tsuzuki should have been repulsed by the whole notion, that mad science was being conducted on his own genetics, let alone an unborn baby's. But if he understood correctly what the results were, he couldn't find it in him to be upset, or even disgusted. "And this—this super-drug, is what this assistant you mentioned used to save people?"

Muraki's smile itched to spread wider. "Yes. It's amazing, isn't it? How many were convinced a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's would never be discovered in their lifetimes? And now this."

"And the patients who were cured? They're doing fine still—no sign of madness, or self-harm?"

Tsuzuki's desperate hope was clear in his eyes, or in his voice. It was not the reaction Muraki had been expecting, yet it could be useful. He pushed himself away from the window, stepping to the edge of the opposite side of the table. "There were no indications of madness," he said, measuring out his words, watching for the moment the cracks began to show. "None of the side effects that plagued Grandfather's research. However, none of the patients your child's DNA was given to is still alive."

"It killed them?"

"Quite the contrary. It made them well—stronger than they had ever been in life. You have your shinigami friends to thank for their deaths."

Needless to say, Tsuzuki would rather it have been the drug. But he couldn't let Muraki see his disappointment, and use it against him. He kept the smile firmly on his lips as he said, "Well, if they took those people's lives, they must have had good reason to suppose they wouldn't fully recover."

"But they were recovered, Tsuzuki. That is what I have been trying to explain to you."

Still, he shook his head. "If everyone who was near death was given another chance with my genes, no one would ever die and it would throw the living world out of balance—"

Tsuzuki jumped when Muraki slammed his palms down on the table, making even the porcelain dolls on the mantel rattle. Muraki hissed, "Don't tell me you actually believe that horseshit!"

"It's not a matter of whether I believe in it!" Tsuzuki shot back. "Those people were scheduled to die and what your associate gave them was not a natural cure. It was something far worse than that—because I am not a natural occurrence!"

"A moment ago you were pleased to hear what miraculous feats your blood was capable of." That Tsuzuki could not deny, though he hated that he had been so transparent about it. "Are you really going to tell me now that if it were up to you, you would still consign those people to death?"

Of course he wouldn't. They didn't deserve to be ripped away from the living world, so soon after receiving a second chance. It didn't matter how that second chance came about.

But that was beside the point, and surely Muraki understood that. It was Muraki, after all, who had made him see so clearly what a curse his existence was, and everything that had come of it. "It doesn't matter," Tsuzuki said, feeling the itching of tears behind his eyes that he was determined to keep there, "because that isn't my choice to make."

"Is it God's? Is that what you mean? Is it against God's will when a person is saved from a life-threatening injury? Why should a disease be any different?"

Tsuzuki cringed from his words. "That isn't what I meant—"

"Yet you defend the actions of your colleagues."

"Yes! I mean—you misunderstand. It isn't their choice, either! They're shinigami. We have to do what we're told—"

"Or what? You'll shut down, self-destruct? Be sent to a hell worse than an agency of murderers for hire?"

"It isn't murder," Tsuzuki tried feebly, but Muraki would not let up.

"And why not?" he said as he slowly moved round the table. "Because your hits are ordered by a deity? Is that what you tell yourself to justify what you do, Tsuzuki—to justify the need for your special set of skills?" He scoffed, but there was no humor behind it. "Every action is a choice."

"You're one to speak about murder and choice!" Tsuzuki could feel his blood boiling in him now. Where a moment ago he had been filled with shame for what he was, Muraki's hypocrisy fueled a different sort of fire inside him, one not as saturated with self-loathing. One that actually felt good to let out. "At least when a shinigami takes a life it's for that person's own good, and after their allotted time is already up. You take life because it suits you, or because it satisfies your curiosity to see someone in pain! The more innocent the better, isn't that right, Muraki? The more creative the torture you can put them through, the better. You never give a second thought to their feelings, or what's in their best interest. Only what's in yours. And you would stand there and insist I'm no different from you? You're a monster—"

"And what name would you give to one who drives another to suicide, as your shinigami colleagues did Ukyou's assistant?"

That riposte, uttered with such unmoved calm, took Tsuzuki aback. Shook him enough that he forgot what he had been about to say next. "What are you talking about?"

Muraki let out a long sigh as he came to stand beside Tsuzuki, his hands in his trouser pockets. Though Tsuzuki could not fool himself that Muraki ever hated being a bearer of bad news.

"The assistant, one Dr. Akiyama, threw herself in front of a train not long after being confronted by your shinigami friends."

"She's dead?" Of course she was, Tsuzuki chided himself. Why else would Muraki feel the need to rub his nose in this?

Which only roused Tsuzuki's suspicions further. He narrowed his eyes. "And what proof do I have that you didn't push her in front of that train yourself? It wouldn't be much of a stretch for you."

"I never laid a finger on Ms. Akiyama."

"Yeah, well, I know you well enough to know you wouldn't have to."

If Tsuzuki had been expecting Muraki to crack a grin at being caught out, though, he would be disappointed. The doctor was as serious as ever. "Ms. Akiyama told me of her plans herself before she died. How the shinigami had robbed her of her reason to live when they took her research, her samples, her cure. Her patients. She felt responsible for those people's deaths herself, and for the pain she put them through. She had no idea at the time that her efforts to save them would be futile. For that matter, she suffered quite a shock just learning that shinigami exist. For a scientist, being shown proof that consciousness continues after death can cause quite a crisis of faith. If you are not already open to the idea, that is."

Tsuzuki couldn't deny that Muraki presented the reasoning behind her suicide in a neat little package. Still: "Why should I believe you that's how it happened? I have only your word to go on, and it's never exactly been reliable."

"Or is it," Muraki said in a lower voice, as his eyes searched Tsuzuki's from behind his glasses, "that you simply refuse to accept what deep down you know to be true: that your colleagues drove an innocent person to suicide?"

Never. Hisoka wouldn't allow it.

But Tsuzuki had to remind himself, Hisoka was gone. And he wasn't sure if he could imagine a Summons Division without him, one where Tatsumi and Terazuma, Wakaba and Saya and Yuma, could be cruel enough to a mortal to cause them to harm themselves like that. Sure, most of them probably wished unmentionable harm to Muraki, but Tsuzuki would hardly call him an innocent.

Yet, if he were honest with himself, he could remember times when rage had got the better of them. The better of Tsuzuki himself. How many innocent lives had he touched, affected, ended, if even unintentionally, through rash actions? Through outbursts of emotion, and powers he couldn't always control? Shinigami may have been born from the souls of human beings, but they were no longer human themselves. Possessed of all the weaknesses of their past lives, and a power to magnify them that they hadn't earned. And in their immortality, their displacement from time, sometimes they forgot how fragile life truly was, and how dangerous knowledge of Meifu could be. How terrifying to the living.

Still, that world was his world. And his old colleagues—Tsuzuki was reluctantly starting to get used to the idea that he may never see them again—they were his friends. The closest thing Tsuzuki had to family. "If there's any truth to how you claim it all happened," he said, "then maybe it's for the best."

"Tsuzuki, do you hear yourself—"

"From the sound of it, Akiyama was continuing your grandfather's work, and that can't be allowed to happen."

"So, taking her life before her allotted time is justified, as his was, because of the threat she posed to Enma's rule? For that matter, why drive her to suicide? By the same logic, your friends would be doing the world a favor if they had killed her outright!"

No, Tsuzuki wanted to say automatically, as he wanted to deny anything Muraki said while those cold, silver eyes bored into him. But the word died on his lips. Wasn't that precisely what he was arguing?

"You don't understand." The words felt like they had to be forced out—as though a war was being fought inside Tsuzuki's own soul, and he didn't know what side he was on himself. "People can't fight their fate. They can't escape death. I know it's a cruel system, I don't always agree with it, but that's the way things are, and I have to believe there's a greater reason for that. Even if I wanted to, how could I possibly change that? What would the consequences be? Even if I could play God, how could I possibly choose which lives are worth saving? Why should anyone have that right?"

"Yet that is what you have done, every day of your existence as one of Enma's trained pets. Decide who lives, and who dies—"

"You're wrong. It's not up to me." If it had been, didn't Muraki think Tsuzuki would have done things differently? "All I do is follow orders." His whole career had been testament to that. Much as he'd tried to bend or skirt what was required of him every time, every time he was unable to change a person's fate. And the more he dug in his heels, the more pain he caused. He could not bear to ruin another undeserving life with his failure to do his duty. If that meant taking the lives of the unwilling-to-die, so be it. It was not for him to question the reason behind his orders.

And finally, the smile returned to Muraki's lips. "Then you are truly nothing but a weapon."

"I am NOT a weapon!"

The files open on the table suddenly took flight, scattered to the far corners of the dining room as though shoved by an angry hand, though no one had touched them. The old chandelier hanging over them had not been turned on, but the bulbs inside it abruptly flared to brightness and burst, raining shards of glass like splinters on the table.

The loss of another antique. But this time, Muraki only watched in amusement. "You're right, of course," he said lightly, though his glare was daggers. "How silly of me. A weapon wouldn't do something like that at all."

The surge of power, though gone as suddenly as it had come on, still tingled in Tsuzuki's extremities, like a warm shot of liquor. He took a step back in chagrin for what he'd done, though no more than one; the crunch of glass under his feet made him suck in a trembling breath.

And Muraki's soft voice would give him no peace. If he had yelled, given Tsuzuki some anger to hold on to, that would have been kinder. "Do you never wonder why Enma has kept you around as long as he has? After all these mishaps of yours that have come to my attention over the brief time we've known each other—after all these years of your service that must have cost him dearly, have you never wondered why he would deny you your right to move on?"

"Because I killed myself." That was what Tsuzuki had always been led to believe anyway. "And taking your own life is one of the gravest sins there is."

"I see. In that case, why doesn't every suicide become a shinigami?"

Tsuzuki had no answer for that. None that he wanted to admit to himself, anyway, let alone to Muraki.

"Or could it be that he knew there was something different about you all along. Something special. Perhaps you gave him a clue to it when your first few attempts at ending your life failed. Perhaps even then he had the vaguest of inklings what you were capable of, what power you possessed. Or even, carried, latent, in your genes."

"If this is your roundabout way of asking me who my father was, I told you, I don't know. I still don't know."

"But are you not curious, Tsuzuki? Would you not like to find out?"

And rather than dredge of up that old feeling of hopeless defeat that always came over Tsuzuki when he thought of his own father, what Muraki said next resonated with something deep inside Tsuzuki that he had thought gone since being brought to this place: "After all, whoever—or, let us be honest, whatever your father was, he was not only responsible for you, but for me as well, and all the suffering that has followed in our wake. If you truly desire justice, for yourself, your friends, every soul you've ever touched with the sin of your nature—don't you want to know who is most to blame?"

The question turned in Tsuzuki's mind long after Muraki had left him. As he wandered the rooms of his prison, it plagued him. Who, or what, had made him? And was that all Enma had ever wanted him for—for his pedigree? His power? Did Enma even care how he suffered for his continued existence, so long as the God of Death got what he wanted out of the deal? Had he ever cared?

How neatly it all fit together, now that Muraki had made him see that. No matter what Tsuzuki did, whether he chose to obey his shinigami nature or defy it, he could not find an explanation or justification for himself that could make him feel right, let alone righteous. No matter what he told himself to excuse his past, and all his deeds, he only felt more wrong.

Akiyama had been wrong. Everything Tsuzuki knew about the balance of life and death told him that. Yet if he had been in her position, known only what she knew, and held the power to heal the sick in the palm of his hand, could he say he would not have done the same thing? Was he really so different from her, when he granted reprieves to the dying, answered their final wishes? Pursued the justice that they were denied? He received his due reprimands for bending the rules to his liking; but what did he care? He was already dead. And that poor woman . . .

Well, even if she had to be stopped, he could not believe that she deserved to die for it, nor that anyone at Summons would have pushed her towards suicide. Not without drastic changes first taking place within the department since his disappearance, and Hisoka's destruction. He could tell himself that Konoe and Tatsumi would never have allowed it, but losing Hisoka might have been the final straw that made them forget their own humanity. For that matter, Tsuzuki had no idea if they were still in control of Summons, or if Enma had given it to some more sadistic denizen of Meifu—

No, he couldn't allow himself to think that way, to suspect his friends, the closest thing he had to a family in ninety years. To start doubting them—that was exactly what Muraki wanted. And Muraki lied.

He was also the only one who didn't treat Tsuzuki like the truth was something he couldn't handle.

But was it true?

Am I just a weapon? Is that all I've ever been?

Something for Enma to unleash upon his enemies when it was convenient to him? Here Tsuzuki had thought it was all to serve out his due penance, or because he had twelve powerful shikigami at his beck and call if things in the field got dicey. When in reality, he was only there to be used.

Enma, the Judgment Bureau, Summons—they had been using him all along. And they had warned him that Muraki would try to use him. What a joke.

Such a joke that Tsuzuki lashed out at the nearest breakable thing at hand. With a violent sweep of his arm, he sent the dolls propped up against each other flying off the side table. Even the way they clattered bonelessly against one another across their floor, their faces frozen in comical looks of childish shock, made it feel as though they were mocking him, accusing him of being a monster. He seized the closest one, a harlequin in green and orange satin, and threw it for all he was worth at the window on the other side of the room. The window suffered no harm, but the impact shattered the doll's porcelain face. The body fell anticlimactically to the floor.

As if a spell had broken, Tsuzuki came back to himself. His limbs shook as he pushed the hair out of his eyes, and made an effort to calm his breathing. He felt foolish for doing what he'd done. Even if he did despise those dolls, destroying them wouldn't make him feel any better. It wouldn't accomplish anything. It wouldn't fix his problems. If he had proved anything, it seemed, it was just the theory that a weapon was all he was.

But as he bent to pick up the broken pieces of the harlequin doll, something caught his eye. A button on the doll's suit that wasn't actually a button. It was a camera, with a big new crack through its lens.

The second doll broke with far less remorse on his part. The third even less so. They were not dolls anymore to Tsuzuki, no longer items that held any emotional value for their owner. They may as well have been nuts to be cracked, for all Tsuzuki cared—the shell of no consequence, only what was inside. He had only one question that he desperately needed answered, and only in breaking those dolls open would he find it, one way or another.

In one's bonnet he discovered a microphone. And across the inner back of more than one cracked skull, spells that Tsuzuki recognized from his decades of work with fuda. Spells to turn the dolls' eyes into little cameras themselves, so that some remote viewer might see everything they saw. And Tsuzuki had little doubt what he would find once he checked the dolls stationed around the other rooms of the apartment.

He hadn't been wrong when he'd felt like they were spying on his every move. He just hadn't known how right he was.